Party and class

Why we need explicit socialist organisation

The assessment by Ben Selwyn, an English correspondent for the Canadian socialist e-letter The Bullet, is typical: Labour’s great mobilisation on 8 June “placed socialist ideas firmly back on the political agenda... let the proverbial genie of class politics out of the bottle”. Even conservative commentators interpret the Grenfell Tower fire as showing how working-class people are abused in an unequal society. The word “socialism” comes up more in workplace discussions. Paradoxically, Labour’s 8 June manifesto nowhere uses the words “socialism”, or “socialist”, or equivalents. It nowhere uses...

The Russian revolution and the British left

It is February 1917. A large crowd are gathered to hear socialists and pacifists denounce the war. As the speeches start the snow begins fall... The hundreds who assembled that snowy night, looking like a scene out of Dr Zhivago, were not in Petrograd 1917 but in Waterfoot, Rossendale. The rally held that snowy evening was to support the candidature of Albert Taylor, a local anti-war trade union leader and member of the British Socialist Party (BSP) in a parliamentary by-election; the campaign on his behalf (he had been imprisoned at the request of the Liberal party agent) was a coalition of...

Towards a broad-based left party?

“Opportunities for the left have been created which never existed before.” US leftists, broadly defined, agree with the above statement by Eric Lee ( Solidarity 410). But that is where agreement ends. The social-democratic and Stalinist left, the identarian left, the non-profit left, as well as most of the labour left are united in supporting Hillary Clinton as the only way to stop Donald Trump. However, in my view, and that of most revolutionary socialists, this is the best opportunity that we have had since at least 1968, if not 1936, to lay foundations for launching a genuinely independent...

Leaving principles for later?

At the Lutte Ouvriere fete on 14-16 May, we met comrades from IZAR (Revolutionary Anti-Capitalist Left), a group expelled in 2015 from the “Mandelite” (Fourth International) organisation in Spain because they called for a stance more independent from the leadership of Podemos, the new broad leftish party. The following critique is part of a document published by IZAR with sympathisers in France, the USA, Germany, Greece, and Italy. “There has been no balance-sheet on the many attempts to build ‘broad parties’ over the last 25 years by the sections of the Fourth International. “Whether in the...

The left before 1968: two contributions

13 February 2016 conference: Before ’68: the Left, Activism and Social Movements in the Long 1960s Two contributions 1. Militancy and Solidarity on the docks in the 1960s 2. The life and times of Bob Pennington Click here to download pdf .

What if workers ran public transport?

At Workers' Liberty summer school, Ideas for Freedom 2015, we hosted a workshop about public transport systems and the struggle for workers' control, featuring Herman Rosenfeld from the Canada's Free Transport campaign; and Janine Booth, worker on London Underground. Click the video below to play. (Audio only from 15 mins).

Love thy neighbour or class struggle?

At Workers' Liberty summer school – Ideas for Freedom 2015 – socialist Daisy Forest debated the Bishop of Manchester David Walker, on the question of 'Love thy neighbour, or class struggle?' Below is a video recording of the debate, and also a transcript of Daisy's speech. We live in a world in which enough food is grown to feed everyone, in which the productive capacity of human kind could meet the needs of each and every human being. Yet we live in a world where everyday children die of starvation or from preventable diseases or are blown to pieces in one of the dozens of conflicts which...

Realism or illusion? The left, Labour, and reforms

While the Labour right openly try to sabotage and smear Jeremy Corbyn, more subtle Labour centrists tell him that he must move only as fast as the middle ground. The Labour left surge of the early 1980s saw the same debate. That makes this exchange from that time relevant today. Vladimir Derer was the secretary of the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy, a central force in that early-1980s surge and still important today. Sean Matgamna of Workers' Liberty replied to him in Socialist Organiser, then the paper of a broad range of activists on the Labour left. By Vladimir Derer Comrade O'Mahony...

Gramsci defies a “terrible world”

Antonio Gramsci was a leader of the Italian Communist Party in its early days, when it was a real revolutionary party, and is now famous for the Prison Notebooks he wrote when jailed by Italy’s fascist regime between 1926 and just before his death in 1937. In this new collection of his letters from between when he was 17 and living away from home in order to study for entrance to university, and his jailing in 1926, the longest section is from just six months, between December 1923 and May 1924. Gramsci was then in Vienna, working with the Communist International (Comintern) to construct a new...

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